1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of software installation and more particularly to authorizing customer managed software installation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Historically, computer programs have been distributed in disk medium—initially on tape and eventually on floppy and optical disk. Controlling the unauthorized distribution of computer software, however, has vexed the software publishing industry from the beginning. Initial efforts to combat the unlicensed use of software involved dongles and passwords. As the distribution of multi-user software has become more complex and as target platforms in target network environments constantly change, early models for software licensure management fail. Modern efforts involve centralized registration and management of end user licensing of software applications.
In furtherance of centralized registration and management of end user licensing of software applications, in today's software configuration installation environment it has been customary to use sales inventory records to establish software configuration transfer or upgrade base starting points. When a customer is first shipped their software product, inventory records are used to accurately reflect the customer number and hardware serial number for the ordered software products. Over time the customer may eventually transfer the software products to other hardware systems within the customer's enterprise.
Typically, a customer purchases a software license and receives a key to transfer the software product on a given number of hardware systems or machines. Since the customer may transfer the software product from machine to machine, it is difficult to determine what version of software is on a particular machine. Usually when a customer orders a software upgrade, there is no nexus between where the software currently resides and the validity of software license entitlement information in inventory records.
In many instances these historical records do not match the entitled product residency. This can result in a configuration starting point that does not match the customer's actual installed and entitled use of a software product, causing a nuisance to marketing teams to manually modify inventory records so they are in agreement with existing entitled software installation support on customer systems.
The problem with current methods is that when a customer purchases a single software product, any attempt to transfer the software product to another machine is prevented. Entitling a software product to a specific machine in a customer's enterprise, and restricting the software product to that specific system only fails to support a customer's ever-changing business requirements.